One for the road

I’ll be back in early July. Please don’t forget about my good enough life! Til then…..

$10,000

When I was a giddy teenager I asked my mother how much she thought a couple should have in the bank before they got married. “10,000,” she answered slyly, knowing the impossibility of such an amount back in the day. That was the sum total of her marital advice other than her general “don’t get married” tossed out periodically.

I was thinking about Mom’s advice the other day when reading the Sunday advice column of Carolyn Hax. Carolyn Hax’s column is an amazing source of intelligent thoughtful advice centered mainly on relationships, romantic, friendly and familial. Her responses always have a knife-edge certainty to them, as she lets bedeviled advice seekers know clearly what criteria they should be considering before making any moves.

Where, I ask you, was Carolyn Hax when I was 18 and jumping into the marital void? It was truly a different world then. Nice, decent, intelligent non-pregnant young people actually got married at 18 and were expected to stick with the program until the death of at least one of them. No one much questioned the wisdom of such a huge commitment by persons so young they were still just raw material for the adults they would become. If you could figure out where you would live and how you would feed yourself, you apparently were good to go.

I was a shaky freshman at SUNYA when I met Don, eight years my senior. He was a transfer student from a community college, a soft-spoken ex-Navy guy who looked a little like Bing Crosby. After dating for five months, I went home for the summer to work and Don stayed on to take extra courses. He soon put forth on one of his visits that it really was a waste of time and money for him to commute back and forth for summer weekend dates when he needed to study. Why should we wait out his senior year to marry when we could do it sooner? Forget my returning to school. What was the point of doing another year when in the end…. Instead of weekend dates, perhaps we should use the summer to plan a September wedding?

I was electrified with excitement! Oh Carolyn, you would have had all sorts of other responses to that expedient proposal. But I, who had struggled mightily to survive my freshman year, felt only a great relief. I could do this. I could do marriage. I had watched two older sisters marry. I could get a job and learn to cook and be a wife. This was a world I thought I knew. That I didn’t know myself at all never occurred to me. That I was sizing Don up as a good fit for my brothers-in-law (he also hunted and fished) seemed mature planning, not the madness it was. With only the smallest pang (I’d been invited to enroll in a creative writing class in the Fall), I disenrolled from college. Two months later I was at the altar sobbing helplessly through my vows.

Three days later on the other side of PMS, I was stabbed by a cold hard reality and discovered a biblical phrase rolling through my head like the refrain of a song: ”All the days of my life.” What had I done? Oh, Carolyn, what had I done and what should I dooooooooooooo? Alas, Carolyn was not even born until four years later. On my own I could think of nothing else to do but hide the twin shames of my mistake and my immaturity and keep putting one foot in front of another.

I got pregnant almost immediately. Pregnancy in 1962 was not the well educated experience that it is today. I’d gone from a college dormitory to a marital apartment on So. Lake Avenue, from the challenge of the classroom to washing sheets in the bathtub to save money. I was ignorant, terrified, and had no idea then that pregnancy’s raging hormones were responsible for the hysterical weeping that frightened both me and Don. Well, mostly responsible. Most of my prenatal information came from television hospital dramas where women writhed in childbirth. I writhed, too.

I know now that this sad marital story was probably fairly common. Further, although left unspoken, I now realize that Don must have felt the same sinking heart.

Don and I were married 14 years. From that sad undeveloped marriage came three bright, interesting and beautiful daughters so regret is rather thin on the ground. It was what it was.

Any other teen-age brides of the 60’s – or any decade really – out there? How did marriage work out for you?

See you in a few weeks.

And no, Don is not his real name.

Mary Martin

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